SMAKMS_FC: Secure Mutual Authentication and Key Management Scheme for Fog Computing

Fog computing was emerged to empower the execution of real-time applications at the network’s edge, effectively resolving numerous communication challenges and enhancing Quality of Service for end devices. As the proliferation of smart devices and their communication continues to grow, the significance of authentication is becoming increasingly crucial to ensure secure communication within IoT applications. We performed detailed study of available authentication techniques and can conclude that a malicious fog server can be a serious threat to the entire system. Using AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool, we performed cryptanalysis of a key management scheme and user authentication protocol proposed by Rahman et al., and found that it is vulnerable to authentication attacks. Further, to improvise the existing protocol, a new efficient secure key management scheme and mutual authentication protocol is proposed in this paper. The security of proposed protocol is tested using AVISPA tool and found secure. We have done performance evaluation of the proposed protocol in terms of communication and computation overheads. We also tested it experimentally on iFogSim simulator to analyze network performance.